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AMD's New Low-Power CPUs
illumina+us writes "AMD has released a new family of CPUs targeted at the portable computing market. The new CPUs, collectively named Alchemy, consume less than 1Watt of power. The CPUs have already been named the CPU of choice for Tivo's new Tivo-To-Go technology and are powerful enugh to run DivX, WMV9, and MPEG. The AU1550 consumes just 0.5 Watts at 400 MHz and the AU1100 consumes 0.25 at the same clock speed. These processors consume so little energy they don't even need a heatsink."
Perhaps these are the chips Supercomputer manufactures should be building machines with. Sounds to be low in cost to build AND low in cost to run.
Letter To Iran
until we can get that kind of low power consumption on desktop chips? is there something inherent in desktop applications that prevent some chip maker from making a really low-power, high-performance (~1GHz) processor?
my pet machine
Two words:
NO HEATSINK.
If you can get a video board that works with only a passive heatsink, and then run this thing with a minimal heatsink, you lower your heat problems.
Lower them enough, and you can get a smaller fan to cool the entire unit, or even get away without a fan entirely (though given how long a TIVO has to stay turned on, it's likely you need some minimal level of guaranteed airflow to avoid overheating the unit the same way you used to be able to overheat an NES).
But the smaller, and fewer, fans you have to put into it, the quieter it is. And living-room appliances want to be as quiet as possible, to avoid interfering with the quiet moments inside of a game/movie/TV show.
OTOH, the current crop of Pocket PCs are able to decode DivX in 640x480 with ARM-based chips from Intel, even without video acceleration. It's not like this kind of performance is a revolutionary breakthrough.
It seems to me that its about high efficiency, not low power. Merely having a low power chip does not help a supercomputer if you need that many more of them to get the same performance.
Generally, the relationship between compute power and power consumption for a single chip is super-linear. So, for well-parallelizable problems, using more chips that are individually less powerful helps you with overall power consumption.